Antonymic Discourse Functions and Manipulation: A Corpus Analysis of Present-Day French

The study of the discourse functions of antonymy was developed mainly by Steven Jones (Antonymy: a corpus-based perspective. Routledge, London, 2002; Antonyms in english. Construals, constructions and canonicity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012), who classifies antonymic co-occurrences in English into ten categories, based on the different discourse functions they can fulfil. On the basis of a similar study of antonymic discourse functions in French, this paper explores how two opposites used in the same sentence exploit our thought processes to influence the way we conceptualise the world. It focuses on sentences extracted from the newspaper Le Monde (1987–2006 and 2009–2011) in which two antonyms are used in co-presence. Through the analysis of these utterances, this paper describes the discourse functions of antonymy in French and shows how the semantic and syntactic roles of co-present antonyms determine the semantico-referential functions they perform. I then analyse how the two major (groups of) functions, the ancillary function and the coordination functions, identified in English journalistic texts by Steven Jones, produce meaning effects in French texts, and how the mechanisms underlying these functions allow opposites to manipulate us.